A Stitch in Haste

William Saletan goes PETA hunting:

Racism draws invalid distinctions. PETA does the opposite: It omits valid distinctions. It equates animals, blacks, and whites, because it misunderstands the nature and history of equality. Abuses of blacks, Native Americans, and women were products of a belief in subordinating the inferior, not the powerless. We learned to respect others not for their disabilities but for their abilities. That's why we'll come around eventually -- and only partially -- to animal rights.

I of course agree with Saletan's conclusions but not with his framing. As I've blogged repeatedly, protecting animal welfare and criminalizing animal cruelty are valid societal endeavors not because animals have rights, but because people do.

Animal cruelty not only imposes costs (for lack of a better term) on the animal, but also on those who witness it or contemplate its existence. Animal cruelty generates objective negative externalities so great that they exceed the private benefits to the inflicter of the cruelty. The conduct can, therefore, be curtailed, even in a free society.

Consider the following hypothetical: Assume a private person owns some private property. He can think of three uses for the property: a dance club, a gay bathhouse, or a cockfighting arena.

Recent trends notwithstanding, society has no legitimate authority whatsover to tell the owner that he can only open a dance club if he makes it smoke-free; there are no negative externalities from having competent consenting adults smoking in a private dance club (ignoring state-imposed externalities resulting from socialized health care).

Same for the gay bathhouse. If you have a community full of Robert Borks and Phyllis Schaflys, then a gay sex club might generate negative externalities that some might (and do) claim justify regulation and even prohibition. But those externalities are illegitimate, because they are based on subjective prejudice and bigotry and not on any objective cost. "I don't like it" is simply not a sufficient externality to curtail private consensual conduct. This parallels Saletan's race-based argument: the fact that you are ignorant about gays does not give you a claim to regulate, prohibit or criminalize homosexual conduct, especially on private property.

The same is not true, however, for the cockfighting arena. Just the knowledge that such an activity is happening within a jurisdiction also creates negative externalities sufficient to warrant banning the activity outright. But unlike the gay bathhouse, the cockfighting externalities are objective and demonstrable -- animals feel pain, and reasonable people derive no pleasure from seeing animals in pain. The community outrage is not contingent on personal biases and prejudices -- all normal people are offended by animal cruelty, but not all normal people are offended by gay sex (one might suggest that no normal people are offended by gay sex, but that's another blogpost).

Saletan is fundamentally correct: the more we learn about animals, especially higher animals, the more indignant we will become toward animal cruelty in its various forms. But that is not the same as saying that animals have "rights." They do not -- we do. And in the final analysis, that's just as good, if not better, for the animals themselves.